On the one hand, I'm going to be mean and merciless. On the other, I need to try to be compassionate, and by the end of this post I'll arrive at some sort of compassion. The inevitable end result is that I'll sound condescending. The best I can say is that I mean to, but this post is not just an admonishment to them, it's an admonishment to the millions of Jews who failed to accept them before it was too late.
This post deals with a particular form of anti-Zionism: not the ultra-orthodox idiots, who deserve their own vitriol, but the mostly secular type that would sacrifice Jewish lives in the name of justice, and would deliberately facilitate the rise of the most fundamentalist Islamic factions in the name of peace. There are religious factions within this movement, but this movement is ultimately secular. This kind of religious antizionist brings the most toxic elements of secularism into religious issues, whereas ultra-orthodox antizionists bring the most toxic elements of religion to secular issues. Whether religious or secular, this post deals with the particular form of anti-Zionism that admonishes us to listen to every marginalized voice except for the millions who shout 'We are going to kill you.'
To the Jews who just don't care, to the Jews think Israel has gone too far, to the Jews who think Israel deserves to exist and defend itself but its strategy is self-defeating, even to the Jews who believe that Israel commits unquestionable war crimes in Gaza, this is not directed at you. We might have arguments, but they're just arguments, they are not bad blood. Even to the Jews who think Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, it will take me years to forgive you, but this is not directed at you.
In the leadup to every left-wing dictatorship, in the leadup to every Islamic theocracy, there were naive progressive voices so disgusted with authoritarian conservatism that they made common cause with anyone who superficially seemed to agree with them. These progressives so believed in justice that they allied with the most militant totalitarians. These totalitarians had the will to violent acts that would disgust every progressive long before everybody else. The totalitarian will to power easily overcame their would be allies - and progressive idealists were always among the first to die. Thousands would follow them to the mass graves, often hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions.
So it would be all too easy for the rest of us to excommunicate anti-Zionists in our minds: to say that an anti-Zionist Jew is as Jewish as a Christian. But we don't have the right to make that claim any more than ultra-orthodox sects have to excommunicate the non-Orthodox. If some form of Nazis kill again, be they Hamas or Charlottesville tiki-torchers (and remember, their main complaint was with Jews...), they would kill the revisionist Jews along with the originals.
It's not enough to call anti-Zionist Jews wrong, even willfully wrong. They're indefensible. They are token minorities who give cover to tens of millions who want to murder us all - at least tens; and they know it. They performatively disguise their egotism in selflessness, and their holier than thou sanctimony is as sickening as any Jew who covers for Trump, probably moreso. They deserve our vitriol, and in the company of other Jews they deserve to feel attacked and shamed; but eighty years ago they were much more common, and their lack of support for a Jewish state just might have been what killed them in the millions right next to the European Zionists who couldn't make it over. Anti-Zionist Jews are morons, but they don't deserve to die. They were all Jewish enough for Hitler, and they willfully ignore that they're Jewish enough for Hamas. It doesn't matter. A bad Jew is still a Jew. They die as Jews, they bleed as Jews, and if there is a god, they will have to justify themselves as Jews.
So long as they cling to this delusion, they deserve neither our trust nor our respect, but they do deserve our sympathy. There is no argument they can make that sounds like they came to their beliefs with their heads. But if they didn't with the head, they came to their beliefs with their hearts, and came to their conclusions as the near-inevitable result of limitations within the Jewish mainstream. So many of them became what they became because their lots are particularly difficult. Whether the issue is social, financial, physical, physiological, romantic, isolative, psychological or mere unlucky circumstance, they or their parents grew up feeling alienated from other Jews, and craving the community we denied them they fell in with dangerous elements, and lost their way as so many billions do around the world. The problem is not them, the problem is us, and somewhere along the way, probably many times, we failed them. We rejected them, we didn't reach out, we made fun of them, we humiliated them, we beat them up, we abused them or we looked the other way while others did it, we made them feel different long before they came to any conclusion, and craving the community we denied them, we made them into true believers who'd sooner sacrifice us all than stop repressing what their brains are screaming at them.
Eric Hoffer, as so often, says it best: “The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement.”
They would, of course, argue that it is Zionism that is the self-renouncing mass movement, where millions of Jews go to lose their heads. We can't pretend they don't have a point. Zionism was founded precisely because Judaism fit in no place around the world for millennia. Even now, there are so many byways in the Zionist labyrinth where you can lose your way: religious, military tactics, settlements, weaponry, the willful accession to authoritarian rule. If they wanted to argue that the majority of Zionists have lost their way, there is a good chance they're absolutely right. By giving unquestioning support to the contemporary Israel in all its flaws, worldwide Jewry has sinned.
But anti-Zionists sin much more gravely. There is no world where sacrificing Jewish security in the name of international solidarity is morally acceptable. There is no world in which it's morally acceptable to make Jews fall so that other peoples rise, if they rise at all as the result of our fall. Maybe there's one world where that's morally acceptable, but that's the relativist, ultra-realist world of Henry Kissinger where life is so cheap that you can annihilate an entire race in the hope of saving other races. There may be a next world, but the notion that a just world comes to ours by laying down our arms is no more likely than the existence of heaven, and what other country, what bloodier country, is demanded to disband itself in the name of world peace?
Whether they realize it, Judaism is pragmatism; it's looking realities straight in the face and negotiating ways around them. This is the Rabbinic tradition, this is the lesson of Moses appeasing Yahweh simultaneously to appeasing the Israelites, this is the lesson of Joseph and Abraham negotiating their survival among the Egyptians, this is the lesson of Jacob dealing with Laban. It is only through pragmatic compromises to morality that you can pursue the moral purpose and destiny you find in Isaiah, Sinai, Amos and Abraham's covenant.
There are millions of apragmatic Jews in every era: zealots, messianists, millenarians, communists, even neoconservatives, and their refusal to stare reality in the face gets Jews killed. They do not believe in moral ambiguity, they only see their way, they see every argument against them as an argument for them. In pursuing their beliefs to their logical conclusion they never build the world they seek, and rather than the pacifists among them acknowledge that sometimes you have to kill to minimize dead bodies, they pave the way for people who maximize them.
Again, antizionists will say that it is we who do not see a way but our own. There is no limit to bad faith arguments that flip truth upside down, but that is precisely the point. There is no world where you don't deal with bad faith, there is no world where you don't deal with people so convinced they are right that that they can interpret everything through the filter of what they believe. Zionism takes in the liberal as well as the illiberal, but there is no liberality in anti-Zionism because it does not admit for the idea that sometimes one must pursue a lesser evil with the aim of achieving a greater good. There is no grey for them, only victim and perpetrator, and therefore in place of liberalism is only a naive national pacifism exploited so easily that no person could use their head to embrace it.
Antizionism is our punishment for our limitations, it is the dark side of Judaism that disguises itself as light and mistakes bitter for sweet.
So it's only by transcending our limitations that we overcome it. Anti-Zionism is not a rational belief, and like all irrational beliefs, the believers change their beliefs not through persuasion, but by being embraced. No matter what they deserve, it's only by accepting anti-Zionists on a personal level and not judging them their mistakes that we persuade them of the single most obvious truth about being born Jewish.
I don't have the room in my heart for them right now. I'm not that good, I'm not that tolerant, I'm too angry, too hurt, too scared. But I hope that one day I have room in my heart for them again just as I hope they have room in their hearts for mine, a fact made doubly difficult because I frankly doubt many of them have any room for me.
But as anti-Zionists correctly tell us, the only way to transcend violence is through forgiving the unforgiveable. I doubt such a leap can ever be made, but I do agree with them that the cycle of violence is only broken by embracing those who would perpetrate the worst on you in the hope that they embrace you back.
But if there ever is to be an end to hatred, this is what's required. The difference between us is that I see no evidence it's possible and to bet on it is bad faith lunacy. Nevertheless, the human spirit is built on dreams like this. The world is what it is, but to dream of a world where a Jewish state is unnecessary is only human. If ever we can convince a few of them to let their dreams remain dreams, let them dream.
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